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St Trinian's Box Set (The
Belles Of St. Trinian's, Blue Murder At St. Trinian's, The Great St.
Trinian's Train Robbery And The Pure Hell Of St. Trinian's) R2 UK
Optimum

RECOMMENDATIONS: I'll be
honest - I didn't see much that I would whole-heartedly recommend this week. The
comparisons we did do not indicate any strong preference for the new issues.
However, number one on my list is - Alfred Hitchcock Presents - Season Two
boiling over with value. This will have to hold me over till Perry Mason 2 comes
out.

Body Double
- De Palma's sleazfest (which I loved in my
early twenties) is debatable whether it is an
homage to the Master, or downright theft.
Combining elements of both of Hitchcock's
classic films Vertigo and Rear Window - it drums
in a modern voyeur-complex with liberal doses of
nudity, violence and sexuality to keep our
attentions off the weak performances. SE DVD
Release Date: October 3rd, 2006

The Last Voyage
- Disaster for the passengers and crew of a
luxury liner when an exploding boiler blows a
hole in her side and it's all boats away. A
certain realism is ensured by using the Ile de
France on her way to the scrap-yard. But with
Dorothy Malone trapped in her cabin and gurgling
just above the waterline through the frenzied
rescue operations, what price anything but
absurdity along with the tension? DVD Release
Date: October 24th, 2006

They All Laughed
- This is a non-musical revamp of Bogdanovich's
(equally unsuccessful) At Long Last Love. On the
positive side, it looks good and boasts Hepburn
in a rare star part at this period of her
career. She's one of two women being followed by
a trio of private detectives in New York. One of
them (Gazara) is after her and two more (Ritter,
Novak) pursue a woman (Stratten) who is having
an affair. Sadly, the film lacks the light touch
it needs and the only (cynical) laugh to be had
is the suggestion that Bogdanovich had La Ronde
in mind. DVD Release Date: October 17th, 2006

Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (Kinowelt - Region 2, 8
- PAL) - There's something strange going on in
Santa Mira. Children don't recognize their
parents. Husbands have become estranged from
their wives. Mass hysteria? Mass alienation more
likely. Dr Kevin McCarthy discovers the secret:
pod people are colonizing the earth, taking
human form but dispensing with the soul. Shot in
just 19 days, Siegel's economical adaptation of
a Jack Finney story (script by Daniel Mainwaring
of Out of the Past fame) is one of the most
resonant sci-fi movies, and one of the simplest.
It has been interpreted as an allegory against
McCarthyism, though it could equally stand as
anti-Communist. (In his book A Siegel Film, the
director has nothing to say on the matter.)
Kinowelt DVD Release Date: October 2nd, 2006

Body Heat -
Hot and sticky, though never less than
sumptuously deodorized, this is a neon-shaded
contemporary noir romance: all lust, greed,
murder, duplicity and betrayal. As credulously
myopic lawyer Ned and slinky femme fatale Matty
progress from dirty talk to dirty deeds (a
disposable husband, a contestable will), there's
the pleasure of unravelling a confidently dense
yarn for its own sake, alongside the incongruous
experience of finding yellowing pulp fiction
classily rebound, or hearing a '40s standard of
romantic unease re-recorded with digital
precision. DVD Release Date: October 24th,
2006

Kansas City Confidential
- An action-packed film noir directed by Phil
Karlson with a flare for showing off how violent
it can be, but it's hardly a credible story.
It's filmed in a semi-documentary style, as it
opens when three masked men successfully rob a
Kansas City bank of over a million dollars. They
use a florist' van to make their escape, where
they meet the fourth member of the gang in
another vehicle--the Mr. Big who set up the
heist. He gives the three spending money and
half of the king card to identify themselves
when they will meet a month later to split up
the loot.

Streamers -
The 1980s are known as being a dark period for
Robert Altman. Having been branded uncommercial
by the New post-Star Wars, post-Jaws,
post-Heaven's Gate Hollywood, the creative
freedoms he and others like Coppola enjoyed
during the seventies, as provided by the studio
tit, were largely stripped from him as he found
himself unable to find studio backing for his
projects. Altman's work in the '80s greatly
reflected this ostracization, as films like
Secret Honor and Come Back to the Five and Dime,
Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean found him moving away
from the freeform mosaics that distinguished his
1970s work and adapting stage plays most of
which were chamber pieces restricted to a single
set. Streamers, adapted by David Rabe from his
Tony-nominated play, is as revealing of this
dynamic as any of Altman's work from this
period, its drama confined to an army barracks
at the eve of the Vietnam war, its characters
all existentially and ideologically "trapped" by
the tenets and schemata of military life.

Red Angel -
A shocking and controversial masterpiece, Yasuzo
Masumura’s no-bullshit antiwar film tells of an
army nurse (Mizoguchi discovery and Masumura
regular Ayako Wakao) in the Sino-Japanese war
who sexually services an amputee and falls in
love with a drug-addicted surgeon. Shot in
black-and-white 'Scope, this 1966 feature can’t
be recommended to the squeamish or to viewers
bound to the politically correct, but neither
its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate,
unpredictable moral focus can be easily shaken
off. Fantoma DVD Release Date: October 17th,
2006

Alfred Hitchcock Presents
- Season Two - Along with Perry
Mason, this is probably my favorite classic TV.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents based itself in
stories of suspense and mystery. Episodes were
often very creative with unexpected twists or
revelations. Season 2 continued to boast
performers who would later become much more
famous, some who already were, and many strong
bit players in Universal camp including - Claude
Rains, Gary Merrill, John Williams, Barbara
Baxley, Ralph Meeker, Jessica Tandy, James
Gregory, Cedric Hardwicke, Hume Cronyn and Rip
Torn. DVD Release Date: October 17th, 2006

Deadfall -
A jewel thief (Caine) falls in love with the
wife (Ralli) of his homosexual accomplice
(Portman). She has been mentally scarred by her
father's membership of the Gestapo, and her
husband, a former French resistance fighter, is
buggering a gigolo. And then, bugger moi, it
transpires that the wife is also her husband's
daughter, and they all commit suicide happily
ever after. Replete with a Shirley Bassey theme
tune and a 20-minute John Barry guitar concerto
to accompany the robbery. DVD Release Date:
October 17th, 2006

The Magus -
An English teacher arrives on a sleepy Greek
island to take up a vacant teaching post. The
last man to hold the post committed suicide
under mysterious circumstances. Slowly but
surely, he is drawn into a bizarre game
engineered by a reclusive local magician. The
deeper into the game he is drawn, the more he
senses danger... yet cannot seem to untangle
himself from the fascinating and compelling
influence that the game is having on his mind.
DVD Release Date: October 17th, 2006

The Dam Busters
- At one time seemingly up as a candidate for
culting by those who found the surrounding
footage of Pink Floyd: The Wall to taste (this
was the movie playing incessantly on Pink's TV).
Anderson and RC Sherriff's tribute to Barnes
Wallis (inventor of World War II's bouncing
bomb) and Wingco Guy Gibson (who spearheaded
their use in destroying strategically-important
Ruhr dams) slips some thoughtful reservations
and some gross sentimentality into its bouncing
bombast. With its final cost-counting, it
contorts the stiff upper lip into something like
a deathly grimace. DVD Release Date: October
17th, 2006

Witchfinder General
- Not as well-known as Robin Hardy's more
eccentric and complex The Wicker Man (which was
also packaged and sold by its distributors as a
common exploitation flick), this third film by
then-24-year-old Michael Reeves (his last film
before an untimely death) is nevertheless one of
the best examples of the witchcraft subgenre of
horror film. Starring Vincent Price as real-life
witchhunter Matthew Hopkins (ca. 1619 - 1647),
Witchfinder General is an intense and brutally
violent film not merely for its time (which
resulted in multiple cuts made at the behest of
the British Board of Film Censors) but even now,
retaining its power to shock much more so than
gore films of the same period, as the emotional
stakes here are established with beautiful
economy.

Santa Sangre
- Like some Fellini-esque nightmare, this heady
mix of circus freaks (a tattooed lady, an exotic
midget, sad-faced clowns) and weird religious
and hallucinatory imagery (an armless virgin
saint, writhing snakes, zombie brides) is
pregnant with disturbing psychological
undercurrents. Traumatised at an early age by a
violent argument between his knife-throwing
father (Stockwell) and trapeze-artist mother
(Guerra), former child magician Fenix (Axel
Jodorowsky), now 20, escapes from an asylum into
the outside world. Reunited with his jealous
mother, Fenix becomes her 'arms' in a bizarre
pantomime act, a role which spills dangerously
over into real life...

Being There
- Sellers plays a mentally retarded gardener who
has lived and worked all of his life inside the
walls of an elegant Washington town house. The
house and its garden are in a decaying inner
city neighborhood, but what goes on outside is
of no concern to Sellers: He tends his garden,
he watches television, he is fed on schedule by
the domestic staff; he is content.

I Am Cuba -
The product of a distinctively Soviet take on
the island’s history and aspirations, ‘I Am
Cuba’ saw Kalatozov, fresh from Palme d’Or
success for ‘The Cranes are Flying’, joined by
that film’s cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky and
poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko as co-writer. The
result is a sensual four-chaptered epic of
injustices exposed in Batista’s dictatorial
Cuba, elevated by suitably revolutionary
camerawork, its confidence a formal expression
of faith in the island’s uprising.

My Dinner With Andre
- Bring two New York intellectuals together and
they'll beat each other's ears off swapping
stories about their psychoanalysts. Here Malle
celebrates just such an encounter, recreated by
the original participants: a sad,
never-quite-made-it playwright (Shawn) and a
brilliantly successful director (Gregory) who
dropped out to 'find himself' in a quest ranging
from Grotowski in Poland to Tibet, the Sahara
and remoter Scotland. Just two people talking,
shot mostly in close-up. Riveting, exhilarating
stuff.

Marie Antoinette (PBS)
- Marie Antoinette is a two-part documentary
that originally aired on PBS channels in the
United States. Paramount and PBS are releasing
it in October 2006, undoubtedly to capitalize on
the release of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
in theatres. This documentary takes the recent
revisionist view that Marie Antoinette was mis-understood
and inappropriately blamed for France’s general
misery prior to the French Revolution. Marie
Antoinette argues that Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette were simply sheltered teenagers,
isolated from reality in general. DVD Release
Date: October 10th, 2006

Napoleon (PBS)
- Prior to 2005’s Marie Antoinette,
producer-director-writer David Grubin created
the four-hour, four-part Napoleon. This
documentary is also a compilation of
re-enactments, talking-heads interviews, and
camera pans over paintings, photos, and
documents. The best parts of the documentary are
Parts I and III, when our attention is directed
to Napoleon’s early years as a youth who
promises to do harm to the French (which he did
by making it Enemy Number 1 in Europe) and to
Napoleon’s pinnacle of domination. DVD
Release Date: October 10th, 2006

White of the Eye
- Late director Donald Cammell's haunting
formalistic approach to formulaic material,
written by Cammell and his wife China (adapted
from the Margaret Tracy novel Mrs. White),
elevates what could have been routine '80s trash
into that hazy realm of the art film. David
Keith stars as Paul White, an audio installation
expert whose idyllic life with his wife (Cathy
Moriarty, as good as ever) and young daughter
(Danielle Smith) is threatened when he finds
himself the subject of an investigation into a
string of local serial killings.

The Ultimate Hammer Collection 20 disc
(She, The Nanny, Dracula Prince of Darkness, The
Plague of the Zombies, Rasputin the Mad Monk,
The Reptile, The Witches, One Million Years
B.C., The Viking Queen, Frankenstein Created
Woman, Quatermass and the Pit, The Vengeance of
She, The Devil Rides Out, Prehistoric Women,
Scars of Dracula, The Horror Frankenstein, Blood
from the Mummy’s Tomb, Straight on Till Morning,
Fear in the Night, Demons of the Mind, To The
Devil A Daughter) R2 UK Optimum Home
Entertainment

Celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of this world-renowned distribution
company with Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus
Films, an expansive collectors’ box set featuring
fifty classic films on DVD. FILMS LISTED
HERE
AVAILABLE
HERE

For less than
$600 you get 46 existing, or upcoming, Criterion DVDs at